Saturday, November 22, 2014

IRS Finds 30,000 Lois Lerner Emails, Enraging Conservatives

By Todd Beamon / NEWSMAX

Five months after the Internal Revenue Service deemed that emails sent
by former official Lois Lerner had been lost forever, the Treasury
Department's inspector general told Congress on Friday that as many as
30,000 might have been found — and conservatives were outraged.

"Nothing they do surprises me," Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell told
Newsmax of the latest development in the agency's targeting scandal of
tea party groups. "Nothing they fail to do surprises me.

"I have no reason to think that this is everything," she added. "Now,
what I would like to see them do is for the IRS to actually respond to
all the subpoenas that have been issued to them by the House Oversight
and Government Reform Committee in the last year and a half.

"That would be the best thing they could do: just go ahead and answer
all the subpoenas and do what you're supposed to do," Mitchell said.

Two top members of the Senate Finance Committee, Democratic Chairman Ron
Wyden of Oregon and ranking Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, said on
Friday that the Treasury's Inspector General for Tax Administration told
them that it had had located data that might have included the Lerner
emails.

The inspector general "has been able to recover some forensic data which
may include documents the IRS believed were missing," they said in a
statement. "This data may include emails to and/or from Lois Lerner
which could be material to the investigation."

A Republican congressional aide told The Washington Examiner that the recovered data included as many as 30,000 emails that Lerner sent or received between 2009 and 2011.

The emails were found among hundreds of "disaster recovery tapes" used
to back up the IRS' email system, according to the Examiner. The tapes
contain at least 250 million emails.

"They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to
get these emails off these tapes," the aide told the newspaper.

Lerner, who retired in September 2013 because of the scandal, headed the
IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status from the
groups. She was held in contempt for refusing to testify before
Congress about the debacle.

In June, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified to Congress that the
agency could not locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because
her computer had crashed that summer. They probably were lost for good because the disaster recovery tapes store data for only six months, he said.

Koskinen testified that they could only find 24,000 Lerner emails from
2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The
agency had pieced together those emails from the computers of 83 other
workers, he said.

Emails of others Lerner supervised during that period also were lost,
Koskinen said — and in a July federal court deposition, the IRS said
that Lerner's hard drive was destroyed and recycled three years ago.

Today,
November 22nd on RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on CPR Worldwide Media, Craig and
Diane will hold NOTHING back on Obama's EO amnesty for ILLEGALS while
still refusing to seal our borders. And they'll also discuss the
latest developments out of Ferguson.

Last spring, Obamacare supporters were ebullient when the Obama administration announced a milestone "victory:" Despite a truly disastrous
roll-out, they'd enrolled eight million Americans in the program. The
Obamacare debate, the president said, was officially over. We expressed skepticism over the White House's stats almost immediately, noting that the official numbers didn't account for duplicates, non-paying "customers," and consumer attrition -- not to mention the high percentage of "new" enrollees who previously had insurance,
but were forced to use Obamacare's exchanges to obtain plans after
their existing arrangements were cancelled under the new law.

Fewer than 10 million people are expected to enroll in "Obamacare 2.0" for 2015, the Obama administration said Monday.
That's a significant drop from the original goal. The
Congressional Budget Office had projected 13 million, but officials said
they expect the ramp up to be slower than the CBO originally thought.
The revised goal is 9 to 9.9 million. It raises questions about
whether Obamacare enrollment will reach projections down the road.
The CBO had projected enrollment would hit 25 million by 2017, but now
the administration says it will probably take at least one or two more
years to reach that threshold.
Officials are realizing it will find it tougher to convince the
remaining uninsured to enroll. Many who opted not to sign up this year
said the cost was too high.

It's almost as if many people aren't too excited about purchasing less-than-affordable coverage that saddles them with high out-of-pocket costs and sparse provider networks. One thing the administration has going for it this year is that the individual mandate tax designed to punish shirkers is rising considerably, although those penalties are still much lower than the costs associated with buying Obamacare health plans. Now we have this embarrassing admission from administration officials, who've been forced to reveal how Team Obama inflated its top line enrollment figure:

What Should The GOP Do About Obamacare?

It should come as no surprise to Townhall readers
that the new Republican congress has no plan to deal intelligently with
Obamacare. That’s unfortunate. The worst thing that can happen over the
next two years is for president Obama to appear to take the high road –
insuring the uninsured and fighting the mean insurance companies –
while Republicans rail about the small and trivial parts of health
reform.

And the worst thing that can happen is the very thing that is about to happen. So here is some unsolicited advice.

To
begin with, Republicans in Congress have created their own internal
gridlock on Obamacare. Even if the Democrats all abstained and let
Republican legislators do whatever they wanted, the Republicans still
could not agree on what to do next.

From the base there is the
incessant cry for “repeal.” But as just about every Republican candidate
in this last election acknowledged, there can be no “repeal” without
“replace.” Otherwise, from 10 to 15 million people will lose their
health insurance. However, “repeal and replace” means transitioning from
Obamacare to a new system. And no matter how radically different the
new system is, it will run the risk of being called “Obamacare lite.”

In
fact, there isn’t a single Republican replace plan that hasn’t already
been called “Obamacare lite.”

And that’s before any negotiation with the
other side takes place. Any repeal and replace agreement that has been
negotiated with Democrats in Congress and with the White House will
almost certainly be viewed with suspicious mistrust by the Republican
rank and file.

Fortunately, there is a way out. In going
forward, the GOP needs to make clear to its own base and to the
Democrats that in any negotiation they will follow five simple rules.

Rule 1: No deviation from a simple vision.
The Republican objective for the voting public should be: Keep your
job; keep your health insurance; and keep your doctor. The most direct
way to get rid of all the anti-job of Obamacare is to repeal the
employer mandate. The most direct way to insure that people can keep
insurance they like is to repeal the individual mandate. And the most
direct way of insuring people can keep their doctor is to deregulate and
denationalize the health insurance exchanges.

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I am an American Patriot...part of the grassroots movement of bloggers spreading the truth the media will not. I am also co-host with Craig Andresen of RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on RSP Radio at: https://streamingv2.shoutcast.com/right-side-patriots